Informational Packet submitted to ADL commissioners on behalf of the Armenian community of Massachusetts

Is the Armenian Genocide “settled history?”

Yes, unequivocally.

In a June 13, 2005 letter to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an “organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide,” made the following points:

"126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the ‘incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide’ and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.”

“ . . . It is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades.”

“The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.”

“The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records . . . Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.”

“Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.”

“The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

Please refer to Appendix 1 for the full text of the IAGS letter to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan.